Hi Henrik,
One thing I would have expected to find in a logistic and redistribution
company was a strong emphasize on EDI communication...
We have a team devoted exclusively to EDI. Our team has been involved in some industry leading projects in foodservice distribution:
https://www.dotfoods.com/who-we-serve/your-resources/ecommerce/suppliers/
Although one of the 3rd party vendor packages used by the EDI team runs on the IBM i, our EDI team has no IBM i COBOL developers. They don't do IBM i development.
What I also am missing in your description is what the current status
is and what the goal of the technical exercise is e.g. run your web
technologies primarily on .NET with IBM I as a backend delivering raw
data or let the IBM I have a more active role in the overall web application
delivering runnable components to the overall web application.
You're missing this because this is precisely the question I want to raise in my company. Right now, when it comes to web and mobile apps, we're only using the IBM i as a database at the very back end of web and mobile apps (a backend delivering raw data to borrow your words). But this has been a deliberate decision. This has been due to .NET having it's foot in the door, thanks to our corporate web site, and no one knowing how to develop web and mobile apps using IBM i technologies.
I want to raise the question of where this positions our IBM i servers in a world of web and mobile. Do we really want to position our IBM i servers as nothing more than databases at the very back end of web and mobile apps that otherwise run on Windows? Or do we want to develop web and mobile apps that are hosted by the IBM i (i.e., that use programming languages native to the IBM i and web servers on the IBM i)?
And, hence, the motivation for this post: What if our shop decides to deliberately position our IBM i servers as databases at the very back ends of web and mobile apps? Should our IBM i COBOL developers be doing things differently? For example, should they become data-centric developers? What can they do to best leverage the IBM i as a database sitting at the very back end of web and mobile apps?
Thanks,
Kelly Cookson
IT Project Leader
Dot Foods, Inc.
1.217.773.4486 ext. 12676
kcookson@xxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: WEB400 [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Henrik Rützou
Sent: Saturday, October 03, 2015 11:26 AM
To: Web Enabling the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Elevator speech on DB2 development and web enablement?
Kelly
I have taking a look at your company homepage just to understand what line of business you are in.
One thing I would have expected to find in a logistic and redistribution company was a strong emphasize on EDI communication (X.12/EDIfact/XML) and track and trace to support the physical movement of goods, but there is no apparent reference to it on your homepage it is kind of hidden in PDF’s?
You have further more described that you have a Cobol and a .NET team of programmers. My guess is that the IBM I runs your core administrative application and that it is either legacy or semi legacy software. Semi legacy should in this context be understood that the company may have started out with some ‘standard’ system that during the years of refinery has become legacy.
Btw, does your Cobol team use SQL in their code or do their code depend on RLA? SQL is a must know technology in whatever you do in direction to web!
It would also be interesting to know what team that handles the EDI and what formats are used. This may seems like an odd question but tells something about which team is used to handle/have skills to handle hierarchical text based data structures.
If my guess I right your cobol programmers are likely guy’s that besides programming in cobol has a deep knowledge of how your business is conducted while the .NET guy’s may have more technical skills but less business knowledge.
What I also am missing in your description is what the current status is and what the goal of the technical exercise is e.g. run your web technologies primarily on .NET with IBM I as a backend delivering raw data or let the IBM I have a more active role in the overall web application delivering runnable components to the overall web application.
As a general remark to node.js I can tell you that it is very hard to move procedural programmers without any web skills into node.js. You will simply overload them with new technologies that has to be learned such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, angular/bootstrap, HTTP, Websockets, PASE, JSON, how to connect to DB2, SQL, stored procedures BUT most important OO javascript that is used by node.js.
OO javascript is one of the hardest languages to learn. Even OO C and java programmer struggle because it may be very different from traditional OO languages since it is event driven, has a non-blocking I/O model and may be used in the traditional way with classes and methods but also can be prototyped and injected in several ways.
In other words, node.js is as raw as it can get and very similar to the JVM and it doesn’t come with any standard UI framework in its basic form, it is just a virtual machine and a programming language like JVM/Java.
So the question isn’t really where you position your IBM I since it can be positioned everywhere, but where do you position your Cobol team. Throwing basic/low level ‘on edge’ web server technology in their face is IMO a recipe for disaster or at least a showstopper while moving them step by step is a feasible roadmap.
Remember also that many of those you discuss with in this forum take many things for granted and has completely forgotten that they have learned their own skills in an ongoing process that has been going on for decades.
They may assume and discuss from the thesis that your Cobol team is at the same level as themselves, but frankly if they were you wouldn’t be in this forum but would attend internal meeting were you would be lectured in their strategies.
This is however not the ‘normal’ case for many programmers that have been sitting in their shop focusing on maintaining a running business system and their current IT infrastructure.
On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 5:19 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Buck,
You make a good point about a lack of tooling in regards to DB event
procedures. It would be nice if developers could hover the mouse over
any physical or logical file reference in any source member and be
prompted to "open" any DB event source members pertaining to each file
reference, for example.
Such tooling would also ameliorate concerns about the "visibility" of
code pertaining to cascading events.
But I wouldn't delay the adoption of DB event handlers, waiting for
tooling to make them more visible. After all, it would be nice if one
could hover their mouse over any procedure reference in any source
member and be prompted to open the source member where each procedure is defined.
Soon after the adoption of DB event handlers, developers begin to view
write, update, and delete statements the same way they view procedure
calls. The benefits of implementing ILE concepts out-weighs the
"visibility" that was available in the old days "monolithic" source
members.
Regarding the question of how broadly or narrowly to scope DB event
handlers so as to avoid unintended consequences of cascading "calls",
that question applies to standard procedures too.
One might begin by writing DB event handlers for data validation
purposes which are called before write and update operations. Once
comfortable with the interface, branch out to business rules which are
incidental to successfully completed updates (after triggers).
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Regards,
Henrik Rützou
http://powerEXT.com <
http://powerext.com/>
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